Has Kenneth Turan even watched Avatar: The Last Airbender?

[elfs]

Kenneth Turan, the usually professional movie reviewer for NPR's morning show, All Things Considered, gave his review of The Last Airbender this morning and said what has to be one of the dumbest things I've heard from him ever:

The best films for kids have always had something for adults in them. That was true when The Black Stallion came out 30 years ago, and when Toy Story 3 came out last month. So one problem with The Last Airbender is that it's pegged almost exclusively to the small-fry state of mind that earned fans for the original Nickelodeon series.

If Shyamalan aimed for the "small fry state of mind," well, that's a serious blow to the film's possibilities, but Turan shouldn't speak of the TV series without having, you know, watched it.

Avatar: The Last Airbender had plenty of "something for adults" in it. It was a smart, complicated show with a huge arc, an intertwined collection of relationships, and definitive crises involving life, death, redemption, vice, and failure. I'm not sure what Turan was getting at here, but whatever it was he surely missed out on the essential issue: Shyamalan has apparently done horrible things to Konietzko and DiMartino's original story, and the 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes gives every indication of that.

Comments

[blaisepascal]

It was evident from reading Ebert's half-star review that Ebert watched and appreciated the American-Anime (is there a better term for American animation done in an anime style?) version. Based on Ebert's review (in which he explains his reasons for the horrible rating), I definitely won't see it in the theater.

Still, I am interested in what friends of mine who are fans of the show think of the movie.

[dip-thong.livejournal.com]

Here's the best review yet of it

http://io9.com/5576076/m-night-shyamalan-finally-made-a-comedy

[elfs.livejournal.com]

"Shyamalan has boiled every epic heroic story of the past 20 years down to its most basic, primal soup-y essence, so he can spray it all over the audience, in a kind of Hero's-Journey bukkake."

ROFLMAO.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Yeah, epinoid made that same point this morning, when he heard the Mondello's review.

Also:

This film had more Racebending in it that waterbending, firebending, earthbending, and airbending, combined. The casting call specifically went out for white actors. When too many people complained, they changed several of the actors to look "more ethnic" &hellip making many (most?) of the Fire Nation characters dark-skinned.

Let me repeat that: They made the heroes white and the bad-guys dark-skinned.

I heard about all of this over a year ago. (So, I'm going from memory of possibly outdated information. If I'm not totally accurate, please to correct.) Margaret Cho had a few choice things to say on her own blog about this &hellip situation.


BTW:
Konietzko and DiMartino made a comment about the planned film in one of the last few episodes of the series. I don't know the title, but it's the episode where the main characters go to a play about the previous events of the series. The play-within-the-show was painfully inaccurate. Konietzko and DiMartino ended that episode with the main characters lamenting that they ever went, with Sokka delivering the last line: "At least the special effects were good."

[drhoz.livejournal.com]

Quoted for truth